It came off in her hand. For a moment it lay solid and heavy in her palm, and then what looked like genuine brass shrank and lost its shape and vanished into nothingness. The door it had attached to vanished with it. She faced a bare wall.
Shaken, she turned away toward the surrounding figures and shrank from the leering visages. They appeared no more animate, yet hadn’t that head been more cocked? She didn’t remember that eye being closed in a wink. A hand that had pointed straight up toward the ceiling now angled to point at the far wall. Knees that had bent in a crouch were straightened. Yet her terrified gaze caught no sign of movement.
Telling herself that the changes were only tricks of her imagination and the wavering light, she took one hesitant step forward. Another. Vainly she tried to steady her trembling hands and stop the light’s fickle dance. The stone creatures seemed to gloat as she moved back into their midst. She watched lest they tighten the circle and cast their stone bodies on her.
Nothing moved.
Breathing a little easier, she walked slowly toward another door. She turned sideways to slip between two statues, facing one and turning her back on the other. Gritting her teeth, trying not to look at the goggly eyes, the warty nose, and the huge grinning mouth, she pushed herself through the gap.
A cold stone hand fell heavily on her shoulder. She screamed. The statue behind her crashed to the floor. Its fall set the others swaying and thudding together like a thunderous rock fall. She jumped for the door and grabbed the handle, praying that it would not vanish like the other.
It turned, and she sprang through the doorway. A long dark corridor stretched ahead of her. The way to the laboratory!
Alair must have been awakened by all the noise, but she had been through too much to give up so close to her goal. She rushed forward, halted when the lamplight fell on a figure blocking the way.
She’d forgotten the stone image of the housekeeper that stood in this hall. It faced her, a scowl carved on its face, its arms akimbo. She started to edge around it.
A gray arm whipped out to block the passage. “You’ll want to be shown the way to your room,” the housekeeper said.
Kyla reeled back, aghast. A cold, hard hand gripped her wrist. The lamp fell from her shaking fingers and shattered on the stone floor. The burning wick ignited the spilled oil, and it blazed up, illuminating the corridor in a fiery glow. The housekeeper released her wrist, and Kyla leaped away from the flames.
The housekeeper walked into the midst of them and stomped on the pool of burning oil, undaunted and unharmed. Kyla watched in horrified fascination as the woman beat down the blaze with her feet until she crushed out the last sparks, and the corridor plunged into darkness.
The housekeeper’s heavy steps came closer. Kyla flattened herself against the wall. In caterpillar fashion she edged along it. Inexorably the slow tread approached.
A furious barking burst out at the far end of the corridor and raced toward her, the booming sound filling the passageway with echoes. As it reached Kyla, the barking turned to snarls. A reverberating crash deafened her—the sound of stone shattering. A warm tongue licked her hands.
“Ruffian! Oh, Ruffian! Thank you!” She hugged the dog, felt his wagging tail catch in her cloak and flap the cloth back and forth.
Teeth closed gently around her wrist and pulled. At the dog’s urging, she hurried with him through the darkness. Her groping hand met a wood surface. A door.
She couldn’t find a latch. Alair had commanded the laboratory door to open. “Open,” she said with no success.
Something prompted her to sing, “Open,” in her best windspeaker’s tone.
The door swung inward. She and Ruffian passed from the blackness of the hallway into bright light. Momentarily blinded, she blinked until her eyes adjusted. She had found the laboratory.
Afraid the light meant the mage was here, she checked every corner. No one was in the room. She was safe, but not for long, after all the commotion. Less than a handbreadth from her hung the chain.
She reached out, touched it carefully, not sure what danger it concealed. Her hand closed gingerly around the thick links. When nothing happened, she tightened her grip and pulled.
“Take your hands off that, you fool!”
She released her grip and whirled around.
Alair stood in the doorway, his long cloak swirling around him like black smoke, his eyes blazing.
Ruffian whined and groveled on the floor.
Kyla shielded her face with her arms and shrank back, looking for somewhere, anywhere to flee from the mage’s wrath. Her back struck the heavy metal chain. She raised her hands higher, reached above and behind her, and, scarcely conscious of what she was doing, grabbed hold of the chain and yanked it hard, producing a grating noise.
With a bellow of rage Alair loomed over her and pried her fingers from the chain. Shouting, “Fool! Fool! Fool!” he thrust her into the corridor. She stumbled forward, lost her balance, and fell among shattered fragments of stone.
Alair lifted her up and over the debris and strode down the corridor, carrying her effortlessly as though she were a rag doll. Kicking and yelling, she struggled to free herself.
The light spilling from the open laboratory door dimmed as he proceeded through the long hallway, but the growing darkness did not slow his pace. “Open,” he ordered the door at the corridor’s end. It swung open to allow his entrance, swung shut behind him. “Light,” he said into the darkness. An eerie glow sprang up.
He had brought her to the chamber of stone monsters! They were all standing upright again. He dumped her onto the floor in their midst.
She lurched to her feet, pulled her cloak around her, and tried to recapture her dignity. “What are you doing?” she demanded. “I meant no harm.”
“No harm! You may have destroyed my life’s work.” His voice rocked the stone figures. “I told you not to touch the chain. I told you Claid lied about it.”
“Claid said I could help him by pulling the chain, and I believe him.”
“It’s time you started believing me. I’d hoped—But now I’ve got to undo the damage you’ve done.”
“What damage?” she demanded. “Is Claid free?”
“You’d better hope he isn’t,” he said. “You’ll stay here and make no more trouble while I check.”
She tried a more diplomatic approach. “If you’ll only bring Claid here and prove to me that he’s safe, I’ll leave and never bother you again.”
“Silence!” he thundered, and, “Guard,” he commanded the sculpted figures. With that, Alair stalked from the room.
Slowly, ponderously, the statues began to move. Their heavy feet stomping on the wooden floor, their faces grinning maliciously, the stone horrors joined hands and circled her in a grim parody of the children’s game of “Circle the Kettle.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
DARK COMPANION
The light Alair had magically kindled faded after his departure. The stone figures grew more menacing in the gathering gloom. Soon they were no more than masses of moving darkness.
Thump! Thump! Thump! Stone feet beat a funereal tattoo on the wood floor. The boards creaked in protest; the building shuddered with the impact of the feet pounding in unison. Thump! Thump! Thump!
Kyla stood motionless, clutching her cloak tightly about her, arms hugging her breast, her breath sucked in to make herself a smaller target for the circling ogres. From time to time she felt the rough scrape of cold stone against her arm or back or shoulder, and her teeth clamped down on her lip to keep from shrieking. The metallic taste of blood filled her mouth.
Thump! Thump! Thump!
Round and round the monsters stomped. They did not harm her. She recalled that Alair had ordered the figures to “guard,” not “attack.” Had they intended her real harm, they would have crushed her by now. The passing nudges might be inadvertent at best, at worst a warning against an attempt to escape.
If only she could escape, but each thundero
us stomp of the stone feet told her an attempt would be futile.
Thump! Thump! Thump! Imprisoned within that incessant sound, her only escape was to turn inward. She couldn’t, her inner world was filled with thoughts as black as the darkness through which the monsters moved.
She’d failed Claid. She didn’t trust the vision in the black box. Nor did she trust Alair. Nothing in the mage’s house was what it seemed. She should have gone outside before nightfall and summoned the wind to aid her. Instead she’d dithered and dallied and let herself be charmed by Dannel’s seductive poetry. She’d eaten and drunk beneath the mage’s roof. When she had acted, her pull on the chain led only to disaster. Despite Alair’s fury, it had produced no result that she could see.
Thump! Thump! Thump! The pounding feet filled her with despair.
She’d failed her villagers, too. She should never have deserted them. If Claid had escaped the mindstealers, maybe he had helped them as Alair had said he could, but she didn’t trust Alair.
Thump! Thump! Thump! The pounding thudded through her brain, perhaps creating a new pathway as her tapping had done to the brainstone that had held Alair’s mind.
“I’d hoped—” the mage had said, and left the words unfinished. Somehow that unuttered hope made Alair more human, almost vulnerable. It made her fear that his claim could be true, and by pulling the chain she could have ruined his life’s work.
Thump! Thump! Thump! Her thoughts marched in circles along with the animated statues.
Claid was a trickster; his behavior in Waddams had proved that. If he was safe and had never really been in danger, then by sending her here and telling her to pull the chain he might have been playing some monstrous joke on her and on Alair, and she’d been ensnared in his web of deceit.
Thump! Thump! Thump! She felt her head would burst from the ceaseless drumming, like the brainstone when it gave up Alair’s mind.
She could not be sure of anything Claid had told her. She wanted to believe Alair, but the mage refused to tell her who or what Claid was. His anger and secretiveness about the chain convinced her that it did have some connection with Claid.
Thump! Thump! Thump! Her thoughts circled round, returning always to their starting point: Claid.
Where was he? What was he?
“Claid!” In her distress she called the name aloud.
“I am here, mistress,” a voice spoke in the darkness.
The thumping and the creaking and the shaking ceased, and in the stillness she heard the beating of her heart.
“Claid?” Her plaintive query swelled to fill the room.
Silence again.
“Claid?”
“I am here, mistress,” repeated the voice that resembled Claid’s yet held subtle differences.
If only she could see. She thought of Alair’s producing light with a word. “Can you ... can you give us some light?”
“Alas, mistress, the kindling of light by magical art is not one of my skills. But I’ve returned these horrors to their inanimate state, and I can guide you from this house to a safer place.”
“I came here because of you.” Kyla could scarcely hold her voice steady as reaction set in; with relief came weakness and trembling. All the anxiety and fear and anger and confusion she’d been feeling coalesced into a torrent of words and launched itself at its hapless target. “I thought the mindstealers would kill you. I thought Alair was your only hope. I seduced the wind into bringing me here, and Alair laughed at me and told me you were safe and showed me your image in a black box, and you were lying under the trees eating caronuts, and I didn’t know whether it was true or some trick of Alair’s, but if it was true I knew you had tricked me.”
She wanted Claid to comfort her, to reassure her, but he didn’t touch her. She couldn’t locate him in the blackness, and the flow of words refused to shut off. “I knew the mindstealers had carried you off, I couldn’t believe you were safe no matter what the black box showed, and I begged Alair to bring you here, but he wouldn’t. I saw the chain and pulled it like you told me to, and he was so angry he shut me in here with these stone things and … and …” Salty tears streamed down her face, choking off the tide of words, leaving her hiccoughing and feeling thoroughly foolish.
A hand clamped around her wrist. It didn’t feel like Claid’s hand. Not like a human hand at all. It was cold and hard and thin-fingered like a bird’s claw, or a lizard’s. She gasped and tried to pull away, but beside her Claid’s voice, or the voice that sounded so like Claid’s, said, “You’re safe now. Let me lead you out.”
Gathering courage, she placed her other hand over the hand that gripped her wrist. Her probing touch confirmed that no human hand but some taloned thing held her. “You … you aren’t Claid! What are you? Let me go!” She struck out at the thing beside her. Her hand shoved at something her own height or taller, not the child Claid had been. She screamed.
“Hush, mistress, you’ll summon Alair. It is I, truly, but in a different form. Alair transformed me into something repulsive as a punishment. I didn’t want to tell you until we were safely away from here.”
“What … what are you?”
“You’ll see soon enough, mistress. Only come before Alair finds us. We must be down the mountainside and far from here before he discovers we’re gone.”
Still in his grip, Kyla hesitated. “If he brought you back, he can do so again.”
“He did not bring me back, mistress. You did. When you pulled the chain.”
“I did? By pulling the chain?” Kyla squinted into the dark, trying to make out some feature of the being who claimed to be Claid.
“You brought me, and if you’d pulled a bit harder and hung on a bit longer, you might have freed me altogether. As it is, you distracted Alair enough to allow me more freedom of movement than I’ve enjoyed in long years.”
Seething with doubts and questions, Kyla opened her mouth to speak, but a loud boom shook the building and rattled the stone ogres. Were they resuming their interrupted march?
The clawed hand tightened around her wrist. “We have to go. Now.”
She let herself be pulled along, though the absence of light gave her no notion of where she was being taken. She knew only that they did not collide with any of the monsters despite the swiftness with which her companion moved. He must be able to see in the dark. She’d suspected Claid of having that ability.
A door opened, closed behind them. They were outside. The cold night wind snarled and bit.
The darkness was not total, as it had been inside. The night was cloudy and moonless, but the scudding clouds parted to allow intermittent glimmers of starlight. Kyla made out a tall, spindly shape at her side, darker than the surrounding night, a vague shadow figure. Her unease increased. Whatever this thing was, it was not Claid. If only she could see …
It hurried her along an icy path and started down the snow-covered mountain slope.
Kyla dug in her heels. “Stop! We’ll be killed.”
Her companion jerked her forward, slowing a little. “I know the way. The danger is in Alair’s house. We must be gone.”
“Claid told me to come here. You can’t be Claid.” With the protest she yanked her hand free of the taloned grasp, stopped, and tried to turn back. Her companion grabbed at her. Dodging, she skidded, fell, and began to roll down the snowy slope. The taloned hands caught her. The head bent over her, and in the starlight orange eyes gleamed.
She screamed and twisted from beneath its grasp. Panic drove her to her feet. Hunched against the wind, she bolted toward the house. “Mindstealer!” she shrieked. “Help! Mindstealer! Help!”
The creature, puffing and scraping behind her, moaned, “No, mistress. Hush, please. It’s only Claid.”
Blood pulsed in her ears, shutting out his words. A light appeared before her. The house. In the open doorway, bathed in a rich flood of light, stood Dannel. Her dash carried her into his arms. They closed around her, he swung her inside, and the door slammed shut.
“I was looking for you.” His soft voice eased her panic. “I was worried about you. You’re cold and wet. Come and sit by the fire.” He let her go and stepped back toward the fireplace.
“There’s a mindstealer. Out there. It almost had me.” She was breathing hard, her fright returning.
“You’re safe, Lady Kyla. Nothing ‘out there’ can harm you. Come and warm yourself.”
He took her hand and led her to the wooden chair with its cushioned seat. In the fireplace logs blazed, filling the room with golden warmth. She unfastened the neck-clasp of her snow-soaked cloak and let the garment fall onto the back of the chair. The fire’s heat stroked her, eased her tension. She dropped into the chair. Dannel sat opposite her.
She looked down at the three books she’d left stacked beside her chair, the poetry book on the top. Crumpled beside the books, like a discarded rag, lay her windspeaker’s shift, the symbol of her profession. She snatched it up and smoothed it. Carefully she folded it and rose to put it into her pack, which still leaned against the wall behind her chair.
Dannel leaped to his feet. “How careless of us to leave your things lying here. They should have been gathered together and put into your room. I’ll see to it. And I’ll make you a pot of hot tea. Sit down, please. Rest yourself.”
Kyla stood over her pack, fumbling with its ties. “No, Dannel, sit, please. I need to talk to you.” She arranged the shift neatly over the eight books inside the pack.
When she returned to her chair, Dannel hovered beside her as though it pained him to sit. “You’ve had a bad fright, Lady Kyla. Hot tea would do you good.”
She shook her head. “Not now, Dannel. Where’s Alair?”
“In his laboratory. There was an accident, and he has damage to repair. Do you want me to take you to him?” He leaned toward her to help her up.
“No!” Kyla shuddered. “He’s angry with me. He’ll blame me for whatever happened—and maybe it is my fault.”
Dannel clucked sympathetically. “Well, you don’t have to worry about his coming here. Not with the mess to clean up, and he’s hurt his foot besides.” He settled into the other chair. “Tell me about the mindstealer.”
Mistress of the Wind (Arucadi Series Book 1) Page 12